Functional Approach to a Fuel Cell Thermal Management System in Safety-Critical Applications

Abstract

One promising approach to increase the environmental compatibility of future commercial aircraft is the use of fuel cell systems. In the future, these are to be integrated into the aircraft architecture, for example to supply aircraft systems with electrical power. In this context, one of the greatest challenges is the design of a safe thermal management system (TMS), since fuel cells produce a large amount of heat despite a high efficiency of over 50 %. This paper identifies the relevant interfaces and functions of the TMS using a function-based approach. In the first step, a functional structure of the fuel cell system is created within an MBSE model, which can be used to identify all the key interfaces to the TMS. In the next step, the functions of the TMS are determined. To evaluate the effectiveness of the presented approach in a safety-critical application various architectures from the literature are analyzed. The considered functions and components are compared against the result of the functional design to identify potential blind spots of the different methods and existing literature.